Sunday, May 31, 2015

Today is Trinity Sunday, the only principal
feast of the Church that’s devoted to a theological doctrine rather than the
life of Jesus and his followers. As your
three priests talked about this coming feast day and how we would manage it
homiletically, Fr. Marcus looked at me and said, “Don’t we have a seminarian
somewhere we could make preach that Sunday?”
It’s a notoriously awful day to draw the short straw as the preacher
because, frankly, you’re set up to fail from the start. The whole point of the Trinity as a model for
understanding God is that God can’t be understood in human terms. So, Mr. Preacher, good luck with that.

Our readings this morning do a great job
of illustrating God’s incomprehensible reality.
This God is the transcendent, majestic sovereign of the universe,
attended by flying serpents and towering above the holy Temple, filling the
whole place with just the outer hem of a regal robe. This God’s voice thunders, breaking the cedar
trees and making the giant oak trees writhe.
And – not “but,” but “and” – this God adopts us as beloved children, the
Holy Spirit joining with our own spirits in an eternal bond, giving us the love
of a parent from which nothing can separate us.
And, unbelievably, that love comes to dwell among us in Jesus, spending
time with everyone from criminals to doctors of the law like Nicodemus in today’s
Gospel reading. In his interview with
Jesus, we hear Nicodemus, a brilliant man, mystified by the paradox that we
must be born not just once but twice, not just of human parents but of God –
the God who loves us deeply enough to die that we may live, defeating death so
that we “may not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

Frankly, all this makes little sense from
a human perspective. Everything about
God is paradoxical. As the theologian
and church pioneer Ian Mobsby says, we know “God through mystical encounter
rather than knowing God as a set of objectified facts.”1 A couple of weeks ago, Fr. Marcus was
preaching about dogma and its tendency to undercut the mystery that is God; and
he lamented that we often try to explain rather than encounter the divine, that
we rely on prose rather than poetry to know God. We face that temptation especially on this
Sunday, when the doctrine of the Holy Trinity can quickly deteriorate into a
nonsensical numbers game – “three in one and one in three” and all that. It doesn’t usually work too well to say “I
love you” with an equation.

Well, the ancient Greek theologians knew
how to talk about the triune God in appropriately mysterious terms. To describe how the three separate persons of
the Trinity interrelate, they used the term perichoresis.
If you break that word down, it means
distinguishable parts making up a whole, and relating to each other dynamically
and in close proximity.2 OK,
picture that: distinguishable parts making up a whole, and relating to each
other dynamically and in close proximity. In other words, it means a
dance. As Ian Mobsby says, perichoresis tries to capture the
reality that “the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer are interpenetrative,
embracing and permeating each other” in a “profound sense of fellowship.”3

Well, if that doesn’t make things
immediately clear for you, try this: Experiencing
the Trinity is sort of like watching an old Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire
movie. You know you’re seeing something
more than simply two individuals taking predetermined steps at a predetermined
pace. It isn’t just scripted movement;
it’s dancing – partners knowing where each other plans to go but making the
steps new each time. By the same token,
the Holy Trinity isn’t a mathematical formula for God, some complex equation to
explain everything. The doctrine of the Holy
Trinity is a poem, a poem that narrates a dance.

So, this morning, I want to preach you a
poem. You’ll find it in the bulletin
this morning, and you can follow along if you’re someone who likes to see words
on paper along with hearing words out loud.
Or just close your eyes and listen – whatever works best for you.

Now, for those of you who think you don’t
like poetry, please hang in there and at least give me a minute or two before
you check out. I used to think I didn’t
like poetry either. For those of us who
are wired to be practically minded, people who like to get things done – we may
see poetry at best as a nice diversion, or at worst as an incomprehensible jumble. Maybe I’ll be guilty of a jumble, too, but at
least hear me out. If nothing else, it
means the sermon is shorter than usual – two Sundays in a row! That’s worth something.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Here’s my holiday-weekend present to
you: A short sermon. This morning, we’ll baptize 10 new
Christians, young people and adults, which is a fabulous time-management challenge
to face. So we all get to benefit from
tight preaching this morning.

First, let me say, Happy Memorial Day
weekend. Every year at this time, we
honor those who’ve gone before us, traditionally visiting the cemetery to
decorate the graves of those we love but see no longer. Particularly we remember those who died
having served this nation, their lives a living sacrifice and sometimes a final
gift to their fellow citizens. The
flowers on the graves this Decoration Day remind us, and the world around us,
that “life is changed, not ended” (BCP 382) when we die – that those we
remember are continuing to live their eternal lives empowered by the same Holy
Spirit that empowered the apostles and that empowers our witness to God’s love
and Christ’s kingship.

For we who are the Church, this weekend
also brings a different holiday this year, one of the seven most holy days on
the Church’s calendar. Today is
Pentecost – the feast 50 days from Easter and 10 days after Jesus’
ascension. That gap between Ascension
and Pentecost always puts me in the shoes of the apostles, that dubious
leadership group, who had 10 long days to stare at each other and wonder, “Now
what the heck do we do?” The Book of Acts
tells us they took that time to replace the traitor Judas with Matthias and that
they were “constantly devoting themselves to prayer” (1:14). I’ll just bet they were. I mean, Jesus had promised the disciples he
would send the “Advocate,” the “Spirit of truth” that comes from the Father,
the one “who will guide you into all truth” (John 15:26;16:13), as we heard in
today’s Gospel. But my hunch is that by
about day 3 or 4, the disciples were getting a little nervous about what was next
for them. By day 10, no wonder they were
all in a room hiding out from everybody else.

Then came the Jewish festival of
Pentecost, with faithful Jews from across the Roman world gathered in
Jerusalem. And as the disciples prayed
together, that Holy Spirit literally blew into the room, literally set the
disciples on fire like burning bushes with flame that did not consume, and
empowered them to speak in other languages – the tongues of the people gathered
there in Jerusalem and living throughout the rest of Caesar’s empire. The disciples had been equipped and inspired
to be apostles, which means those who are sent – sent to speak “about God’s
deeds of power” (Acts 2:11); sent to tell a story they themselves had lived, the
story of resurrection and hope and the vanquishing of the power of sin and
death. They were sent to make God’s
kingdom a living, breathing contrast to the kingdom that Caesar thought he ran.

It’s pretty crazy stuff. For the baptismal candidates and baptismal
families, about to celebrate the joy of coming into this movement known as
Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church: Did you know what you were getting yourselves
into? Violent wind rushing through the
house, fire resting on you, the Holy Spirit filling you to reveal God’s deeds
of power in languages you didn’t know you knew.
All this, and it’s only your first day of being a Christian. Who knows what tomorrow may bring?

Well, I’d like to hazard a guess at what
tomorrow may bring – and the next day, and the next. It is the stunning opportunity for you to be the
living, breathing, on-fire presence of God in the world God loves. Among the many amazing realities wrapped up
in the mystery of baptism is this one: that
God chooses to continue incarnating God’s presence in the world, through
you. And me. And all of us.

In baptism, we receive that flame and that
in-Spiriting breath of God; and thus literally inspired, we can reveal the
fruits of the Holy Spirit. You’ve
probably heard these before – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). All those are great, but another fruit of the
Spirit strikes me today, one you don’t find in that list but one that truly makes
the kingdom of God come to life. And that
fruit of the Spirit is passion.

From this glorious, crazy, holy holiday
weekend, here’s what I hope you’ll take away:
Your passion can make all the
difference. And it doesn’t matter whether
that passion seems more secular than sacred.
Maybe it’s writing poetry; maybe it’s playing golf; maybe it’s reading
to children; maybe it’s throwing a great party.
Passion doesn’t have to seem particularly “holy.” You just have to use it that way.

Memorial Day tells this story of holy
passion in its own language,
too. When you think about those who’ve
gone before, when you place that flower to decorate that grave, what do you
remember? Well, the person’s passion and
how it made life better, how it furthered the purposes of God. Bring to mind someone you love but see no longer:
“When I think of ________, what I remember is his or her _________.” If it were my wife’s grandmother I was
remembering, I’d fill in that blank with cinnamon rolls. It’s not that homemade cinnamon rolls are
inherently holy (though I could make
an argument for that). But with those homemade
cinnamon rolls, Ann’s grandmother poured out the love of God on all kinds of
people – saints and scoundrels, within her own family and beyond – regardless
of whether they deserved that delicious love, or not. Cooking for people was her passion because it
was her best way to say, “I love you”; and that’s what God had sent her into
the world to do.

You, too, are an apostle, sent into the
world empowered by the Holy Spirit with passion for something. Use that passion to put your own flesh and
bones on the love of God. Use it to
evoke the kingdom of heaven in the corner of the world you’re given to
touch. Use it speak and enact the power
of Jesus Christ in a world that still listens to Caesar all too easily. Your passion is the Holy Spirit’s
playground. Give the Spirit legs, and
let it run.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

So, we're in the midst of a sermon series titled, “A Critical Conversation: Exploring the Church’s Harsh
Reviews.” And the topic today has sort
of a “ripped from the headlines” feel to it, given the events of this
week. Today’s critique is this: “Churches
are either too political or too quiet about real issues.” In some churches, you end up feeling like
you’re hearing a baptized version of a political speech. In other churches, everyone’s trying so hard
not to offend that the proclamation gets watered down to Rodney King’s lament,
“Can’t we all just get along?” From my
perspective, neither extreme is helpful – and especially not in a week like
this one, when frightening, heartbreaking violence in Baltimore cries out for healing
Good News.

You know the story – from this week, but also
from too many weeks before. A young
black man dies at the hands of police.
Days of protest ensue. After the
funeral, angry people gather in the streets.
Peaceful exercise of the freedom to assemble for a redress of grievances
turns into violence, burning, and looting.
Police officers are injured; people on the streets are arrested;
businesses go up in flames in the neighborhoods that can least afford the
devastation. On these facts, probably
most people can agree.

Now, let’s hit the “pause” button and step
outside this sermon for a moment. I can
almost hear the voice of the color commentator from the booth, reporting on the
action here at St. Andrew’s this morning.
“So, Jim, which direction will Fr. John go? Will he turn this sermon political, or will
he go for, ‘Can’t we all just get along?’”

We’ve watched enough news to know there are
a couple of competing narratives for incidents like this. On one side are the commentators who see
Freddie Gray’s death as the most recent in a series of events showing that, in
this culture, black lives don’t matter. This
side will describe police treatment of African Americans as the voting rights
of this decade, the next great arena in the struggle for freedom that’s been
waged for 400 years now. For this side, the
narrative extends to the deepest issues of poor communities – failing schools,
deadly violence, absent opportunity.
That’s how one side sees it. On the
other side are the commentators who see Freddie Gray’s death as another in a
series of tragic but unrelated events being used by political agitators looking
for a fight, as well as “thugs” looking for an excuse to loot and burn drug
stores. For this side, at least part of
the narrative is honest confusion: “What do these protestors want, anyway? We can’t know what happened to Freddie Gray
until an investigation takes place. You
can’t just burn buildings and throw bricks at police because of one awful, isolated
incident.”

So, which side is Fr. John going to
take? Who’s he going to alienate this
morning?

Well, let me share a little of my own
story with you. I’m old enough to have
begun my career at a time just before a couple of big changes took place in arenas
I cared about deeply. As a young man, I believed
American democracy, aided by a free press, represented our society’s best
hope. I came out of college intending to
be a journalist, and I worked briefly as a copy editor. But I got the opportunity to get into
government, working as a speech writer for John Ashcroft when he was governor
of Missouri. I could have seen myself as
one of those young staffers on The West
Wing, fast-walking through the halls of power to improve people’s lives. But through my own experience in the
governor’s office, and having watched the institutions of journalism and politics
change drastically over the last few decades, I see little remaining of what I
once believed in. If there ever was a
grand narrative of objectivity in journalism, or a grand narrative of the
common good in politics, they’re gone, at least for now. And frankly, I don’t see them coming back
anytime soon.

So, since I don’t really trust either
journalism or politics much, I’m hesitant to claim the narrative of “one side
or the other,” which is the narrative those institutions want to sell us. And as Fr. Marcus pointed out in a blog post earlier
this week, I’m skeptical of religious folks who want to take their particular
side in our racial conflict and baptize it with Gospel sound bites. That’s especially unhelpful when the language
they use undermines the one thing about which we can be certain when it comes to the Church – that church is about drawing
together, not driving apart. Church is
about healing. Church is about reconciling. So when the proclamation of religious people
divides us – whether it’s about race and violence, or about economics, or about
marriage equality, or about any public policy – then church people have to ask
whether we’re speaking for Christ or speaking for ourselves. Now, I want to be careful to say that
speaking about these issues can absolutely be speaking for Christ, if it aligns
with the narrative of Jesus and if we approach it with humility. Where I think we may mistranslate our risen
Lord is when we presume that our particular take on the question must be his
take on the question. In my limited
experience, I seem to find that just when I think I know what’s “right” in
God’s eyes, God tends to sneak around and speak from the other “side,” too.

So, I’m not going to tell you what to
think about Freddie Gray’s death, or the violence in Baltimore, or the travesty
of Kansas City’s public schools, or the disproportionate rates of incarceration
of young black men, or the occurrences of black men dying at the hands of
police. The Holy Spirit will do that
work. What I am asking you to do is to take the risk to enter the conversation
and engage with people who are different from you. I’m asking us to put some skin in the game.

Why?
Because skin in the game is God’s M.O.
Remember what we heard from the First Letter of John: “God’s love was revealed among us in this
way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
… Beloved, since God loved us so much,
we also ought to love one another. …
[I]f we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in
us.” (4:9-12) Christianity is the
religion of the Incarnation; and remember, that word, incarnation, shares the
same root as “carnivore.” Ours is the faith
of flesh and bones. Jesus didn’t just
talk about God. He didn’t just urge
people to behave better. He got into the
mess of our world, into relationships with real, broken human beings who were
different from him. He had deep
theological conversations with Samaritans, who were out of bounds for
Jews. He hung out with perpetrators of
violence and oppression, tax collectors and other criminals. And he gave himself up to die in order to defeat
sin and death – for them. In Christ, God was love itself, sent to give
itself away for those who clearly didn’t deserve it any more than you and I
do. In Christ, God put skin in the game.

“Since God loved us so much,” says First
John, “we also ought to love one another” the same way (4:11). We, too, are sent. We are sent to put our own skin in the game
of reconciliation, healing divisions we see right here in our community. To accomplish that, I don’t have a program to
sell you. I don’t have a particular
piece of legislation I want you to support.
I want you to listen to the Holy Spirit leading your head and your heart
and your hands to love someone on the other side of some divide. And I want you to let that experience change
you. Maybe it’s getting to know a mom
from Operation Breakthrough as part of Sister Berta’s Friendship Circles. Maybe it’s volunteering at Southwest High
School, refusing to give up on the kids of this city whose only choice is public
school. Maybe it’s having lunch with
homeless and working poor people at the Free Store at Christmastime, hearing
their stories and telling them yours.
Maybe it’s volunteering at Gordon Parks School or Benjamin Banneker School. Maybe it’s not just serving lunch at the
Kansas City Community Kitchen but talking and praying with people there. Maybe it’s hearing local African American
leaders speak in our undercroft about TheNew Jim Crow of incarceration. Maybe it’s working with our social entrepreneur,
Natasha Kirsch, as she builds a new venture to break generational poverty among
real, suffering moms and kids in our city.
Here’s an idea: Maybe it’s starting a business on the east side of
Troost – how about opening a decent grocery store in a food desert? Maybe it’s simply coming to United Missionary
Baptist Church with Dr. Tom and the choir and Mtr. Anne and me this Wednesday
night to worship and celebrate the unity they and we share in Christ.

My point is this: The deepest healing will come to the
divisions in our city and our nation, not through the eloquence of preachers or
the arguments of talking heads or the blaming of every side for its failures
and sins. Our deepest healing will come
when our hearts are transformed by being sent to love, being sent to be God’s love in the flesh.

All this is not just a good idea; it’s the
promise we make every time we renew our baptismal covenant. The presider asks, “Will you strive for
justice and peace, and respect the dignity of every human being?” And we each look God in the eye and say, “I
will, with God’s help.” I don’t know
about you, but I find that a very difficult promise to keep. Because if I’m going to keep it, I have to see
injustice. And I have to be willing to “strive” –
actually to do something about racism, for example, rather than throw up my
hands and lament the divisions that have been with us ever since people started
enslaving other people on these shores.

I will admit to you that crossing
boundaries and being sent to love someone you perceive to be different – that
can be scary. Years ago, when I first heard
God’s call to serve people in need, I found a time to work at the local food pantry
when I could be there by all by myself, stocking shelves, never seeing a client. It was scary when I went to the Kansas City
Community Kitchen to serve lunch for the first time. It was scary going to Haiti for the first
time. It was scary walking through the
metal detectors and into Southwest High School for the first time. It’s going to be scary preaching on Wednesday
at a black Baptist church for the first time.
And you know what? God sends us
anyway, because we bear God’s love, and “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John
4:18). Not my love, which is absolutely not perfect, but the love of God. Agapé.
The love that takes flesh and dwells among us and invests itself fearlessly.

I’ll conclude with a truism: All politics is local. That quote is usually attributed to Tip
O’Neill, former speaker of the House; but I’ll bet you anything that Jesus
Christ said it first. Because to Jesus,
the point isn’t which side shouts the loudest.
To Jesus, the point isn’t winning the argument about who’s to blame. To Jesus, the point is to love the person in
front of you. To Jesus, the point is
stepping into the messiness and the beauty of that person’s world, precisely because it’s different from yours. To Jesus, the point is having skin in the
game God’s given you to play. Because
that deep investment of one faithful heart – your faithful heart – will bring more change than a hundred sermons
ever could.